


how to bother your coworkers and influence people

by tangeton



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Corporate, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 04:40:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19077676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangeton/pseuds/tangeton
Summary: Madara has got to find better excuses for throwing coffee all over his coworker, Hashirama. Early-onset arthritis only works so many times.





	how to bother your coworkers and influence people

Madara Uchiha joined Accounting and Finance as a trainee director on a sweltering August day as part of the ongoing merger between Konoha International Holdings and Uchiha Financial.

It was thoroughly mundane except for the fact where it wasn’t. Because life was a matter of perspective, wasn’t it, and Hashirama maintained a distinctly positive one.

(His brother joins Financial Planning the following month, but Hashirama will be blissfully unaware of that fact until two months later when Tobirama comes storming up to his cubicle railing about a certain Izuna Uchiha stonewalling the R&D budget for the next quarter. Something-something- _petty grudge_ -something- _numerical misunderstanding_. Hashirama will offer him his lunch, a sub sandwich. It is a decidedly unsatisfactory offering.)

Hashirama knew the exact time and place Madara would be joining their floor because he made sure to know things like that and because everyone expected him to know things like that. He was a part of the unofficial warming committee after all. The only member, actually. For... well, not _good_ reasons, but understandable ones.

Corporate life had a way of sucking the enthusiasm for fellow human life from your soul. Everyone’s sole desire, in one form or another as it pertained to work, was really to mind their own business and get on with their own sorry lives. This antipathy happened to be especially potent in accounting for some reason or another. In this, he really felt for the newcomer. But given the lateral transfer, he was perhaps already inured to it.

The point being that Madara would not know this about Hashirama, not until months into their acquaintance.

(He will tell Hashirama that he was sure he was bothering him. Picking on him, the new guy, who was swept along with the dust with the remains of his family’s company. In truth, he found him quite charming indeed. But that sentiment will not pass his lips for another few years, when at a social function in a rare stroke of luck, someone manages to get him properly soused.)

Heedless, Hashirama walked right up to the man with the scowl and the messy, dark ponytail and introduced himself.

“Welcome to the company! I’m Hashirama, from Marketing.” The man eyed the hand as if it might snap out and bite him. The handshake was perfunctory and cold, even by business standards. Which was already pretty frigid. “We work on the same floor, right here—” as if it weren’t already obvious from where they were standing, “—and your cubicle’s right over... _there_ , right next to the window.” He let out a low whistle. “Well, lucky you.”

“Do you ever shut up?” was what came out of the transfer’s mouth. Several curious faces dipped out into the aisles. It all felt a bit high school, which said a lot about adulthood. “Uh, I’m Madara. Nice to be here.”

The heads retreated.

Instead of skipping over the faux-pas, Hashirama continued, undaunted. “Only when I’m dead,” he said, winking at the startled new employee. “Come on, let me give you the tour!”

It would be the start of a beautiful new friendship.

But only if you asked the right people. Which numbered precisely _one_.

 

* * *

 

A shadow cast over the usually bright corner of the office. Hashirama saw Madara squint through the flood of light determinedly leaking through the drawn shades at his approaching figure. Well, it seemed like prime real estate was wasted on this one.

“Coffee?” he said, offering Madara a shiny new mug, lovingly scribbled over in permanent marker with what was supposed to be a depiction of his person, complete with every stray strand of messy hair and a bonus scowl to match. It wasn’t very good.

Madara took it anyway.

(He probably shouldn’t have been so flattered.)

“So how’re you adjusting?” Hashirama began, because that was how it always began. “Finding everything okay?”

There was a poignant silence from the other, save for the sound of coffee going down before: “You’re awful at small talk, aren’t you?”

Hashirama’s train of thought rammed into a steel girder and promptly combusted. He hadn’t expected this despite their rather dynamic first meeting. It was corporate, after all. _Please._ What were the chances of him being less-than-polite after the first day? Apparently, a rather significant percentage. It took nearly twenty seconds to clear the mental traffic obstruction before the competitive part of him roared to life.

“Do you even know what small talk _is?”_ he said shortly before dropping his palms over a paper-littered desk to loom over Madara. “Well, how do you handle not-so-small talk then, huh? Like, what are your _dreams?_ And your _deepest fears,_ huh? _Huh?”_

Madara, on the other hand, looked like all his birthdays and Christmases had all come at once. And a little bit of Armageddon, maybe.

And that was how they started heckling each other at their cubicles to see who could out- _‘small talk’_ the other. Leaving the rest of the floor to suffer as their captive audience for a time indeterminate to all but maybe HR, who held the reins on their employment.

 

* * *

 

“Not taking your break today?” His work mug, complete with work coffee, settled itself in the space by his elbow. Previously, it’d simply borne his name, but now it came with a similarly poor drawing of a smiley face with pin-straight hair. He was almost afraid to learn what was written in the accompanying dialogue bubble.

“Ah, no,” Hashirama said, smiling up at Madara and taking up the mug in his hands to sip at. “Project deadline’s coming up, team’s all done with everything else so the finishing touches are up to me, you know how it is.”

“Not really, since I’m not in marketing myself,” Madara said, leaning against the cubicle divider. Hashirama’s cubicle neighbor dared to look over and was promptly glared back down into submission. “But kind of, in the project sense. What’re you working on, exactly?”

Hashirama didn’t have the heart to tell him that by asking him for a run-down, he was digging into his productivity. But because he liked Madara (and _something_ in him told him that it wasn't the usual coworker cordiality), he dedicated the next twenty minutes detailing how they were going to launch their new partnership with Suna Ltd. through their co-produced commercials. That had spurred a storm of criticism from Madara for the style and planned time slots of the commercials, which quickly devolved into an argument about the morality of marketing as a whole, which encompassed the remainder of their lunch break.

Which totaled an hour, tops. In the end, he supposed he’d ended up taking his break anyway. He just hadn’t expected to be vehemently defending his profession on a Monday.

But there were good suggestions veiled in those barbs, and Madara was refreshingly honest in the best ways.

“Hey, brother,” a voice called out in a melodic tenor, and Hashirama automatically turned to address the voice before he realized that it wasn’t Tobirama. “I’ve got R&D’s expenditures, you would not _believe_ how much trouble I went through to get them, damn Senju— _ooh, is that him?”_

Madara’s mug emptied itself all over Hashirama’s shirt, every drop miraculously missing the paperwork.

“Early-onset arthritis. Can’t control it, runs in the family. You know how it is,” Madara said, setting down the empty cup on Hashirama’s desk.

“No it doesn’t—”

Madara slapped a hand over Izuna’s mouth, dragging him away, torturous inch by torturous inch.

“I don’t, not really.” Hashirama squinted at him. The brew was beginning to seep into his dress pants. “You’re not even thirty. And why do I suddenly feel like a cheap date?”

“I said _‘early-onset,’_ didn’t I?” Madara said loftily, and Hashirama was almost convinced of his excuse as he rather jerkily turned away to return to his nice window cubicle, roughly shunting his brother away from the spill on Aisle 5. “Go and find a clean shirt, numbnut.”

“What if I don’t have any?”

So many questions.

 

* * *

 

The break room quickly became something of a neutral meeting ground.

Their small talk never really stayed small talk, instead circuitously meandering into topics more appropriate for maudlin conversations at a bar or sentimental movie nights over tubs of rocky road ice cream. But all they had was coffee, and that would have to do.

Hikaku, of HR, once made the grave mistake of walking into the break room while one of these conversations was taking place in spite of the warnings given by his coworkers in the form of waving frantically at his caffeine-deprived self.

“And I know, right, that he wants independence,” Madara was saying, splashing coffee from the carafe all over the counter, none of it falling in the mug. An anguished expression more appropriate of a stage actor was plastered on his face. “But I’m all he’s got since our father passed and the company—and he’s still so _young,_ barely out of university, really _._ My point is, he doesn’t know anything outside of the family business. _”_

“Now Madara,” Hashirama said in soothing tones, much like one would calm a tiger or raging house cat. He moved the mug closer to the coffee’s trajectory, possibly in hopes of getting something to actually drink. “You can’t expect that all of the experiences you’ve had will match up to the ones he _will_ have. You’ve got to trust that he can handle it, much like you did for yourself. It’s how we all learn, how we best learn. You just do your best to be there for him when he needs you.”

“Easy for you to say,” Madara said scathingly, as scorching hot drops of coffee painted the white linoleum floor. Hashirama made no effort to take the carafe from him. It was likely a hazard he wasn’t bold enough to brave. “Your brother’s more _responsible._ You haven’t seen how Izuna can get when disaster strikes. _”_

“How do you think he got that way?” Hashirama said, bringing the less-than-half-empty mug to his lips and dropping his gaze to the stained floor. Madara stopped cold. The carafe stopped its swinging orbit.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Madara said, and Hikaku, who has known Madara for almost all his life—pretty much all through college—and who was a fellow transplant of the company, swore to high heaven that was _embarrassment_ in the pink tint of his cheeks. “I'll, um... I guess I’ll speak to him about finding a new place. That’s a start, right?”

“I think he’ll appreciate that,” Hashirama said cheerfully, with no trace of former sobriety in his sunny tones. Madara, who Hikaku had sworn had long forgotten how to smile, managed a conservative one.

Then he noticed Hikaku standing dumbstruck in the doorway.

The carafe lurched forward and scalding hot coffee went sailing in an elegant arc all over the canvas of Hashirama’s perfectly-pressed white dress shirt, turning it into a brown Jackson Pollock, sans the artistry.

“Funny how this keeps happening,” Hashirama commented, peeling the wet, stained shirt from his skin with a thumb and forefinger, apparently unaffected by the heat. From the corner of his eye, he saw Madara very nearly gagging himself trying to stop sneaking peeks at his sodden coworker’s form. “Well, good thing I started keeping extra shirts at the office, eh?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Madara said, pointedly _not looking_ but also _very much looking_ and reaching for the paper towels. “Arthritis. Get.”

“Hey, Hikaku,” Hashirama greeted amicably as he passed, unconscionably dropping a coffee-soaked hand on his shoulder and leaving behind a handprint, like a souvenir of the whole harrowing experience.

 _He_ didn’t have any extra shirts at the office.

 

* * *

 

Then someone had the bright idea of hosting a company picnic. There’s a catch—there was always a catch—the main event was a _mandatory paintball tourney._

Was that even _legal?_

The folks actually in Legal were mysteriously silent on this issue.

 

* * *

 

He has just witnessed a _murder._

It was his own. Bright in his imagination, he lay in a pool of his own blood, a strangely viscous red. The absent tang of iron, foreign to his misaligned olfactory senses, instead resembling the artificial haze of paint.

A sharp flash of pain caught him by the shoulder, concentrated like a needle, powerful like a shot. He pressed a hand against it, and his palm came away blue.

“Get down, stupid Senju,” came a voice from on high, thin in the way voices were when they were rather distant. A godsend in the way miracles were supposed to be. Maybe even a gift from the divine. “Do you want to get shot?”

 _“You_ shot me!”

Well, at least it wasn’t coffee.

“And I’ll do it again if you don’t _get over here right now.”_

Hashirama swept up his gun and scrambled up the small hill where a steel barricade was conveniently placed. He wasn’t about to let Madara’s rare bouts of charity go unappreciated, diving behind the barricade amidst a shower of pellets.

“I thought you said you played sports in college,” Madara said, obviously amused.

“When did I say I played paintball? _Never_. I did martial arts!”

“So did I, and I’ve never played paintball before either,” Madara said, which impressed Hashirama greatly. He depressed the trigger. A form that looked suspiciously like Izuna dove into a thicket. “So I guess this is one more thing I’m just naturally better than you at.”

“Everything has to be a competition with you, doesn’t it,” Hashirama muttered, checking his gun. Why bother though, when he’d run out of ammo ages ago? “Why aren’t you teaming up with your brother?”

“Belated teenage angst,” Madara said, knocking his wrist on the hopper and dislodging the ammo. When Hashirama gave him a _look_ , he conceded, “Argument. Tobirama?”

“Bet him I’d come away with less paint. If I lose I’ll have to do the yard work for the rest of the summer. And vice versa.” Hashirama sighed and tossed the gun to the ground. “So, where’s your team?” When no answer came, he gaped. “No kidding. You against the entire floor?”

“What about you, Mr. Stray Lamb? You’re basically walking target practice,” Madara accused haughtily. “Where are your comrades?”

“Well, I was a part of my own department, but then I ran out of ammo. And then I got lost.”

Madara’s eyebrows rose as if to say, _‘on a field as small as this?’_ which he then proceeded to say aloud. “On a field as small as this?”

Well, he couldn’t say he was looking for him. That could go either way, and he would rather avoid being thrown to the wolves, especially for one in his dire straits.

“I— _holy hell,”_ Hashirama swore as something _zinged_ by his ear. Madara looked at him inquisitively, as he’d never so much as blasphemed in his presence in the entire five months he’d been a part of Konoha International, not even all those times Madara had purposefully— _accidentally_ —regularly spilled blistering hot coffee on him. Hashirama looked back at him, desperation breaking out in the form of sweat all over his forehead. “Listen, Madara, I need something to live for. Let’s make a pact—if we survive this, when we make it to the top, we’ll _change things._ We’ll make sure this kind of senseless and unnecessary violence never happens again.”

Madara thumbed open the paintball hopper.

“Finance gets new tech?”

The paintball pod popped open and the blue pellets went tumbling into the hopper, which then shut with a perfunctory snap.

“Quality coffee for the break room.”

 _“Better,”_ Madara replied with a savage grin, and it was such an anachronism how perfectly out of place it was in this day and age, this kind of reckless bloodlust that should have been reserved for surviving lawless and war-torn periods like the Sengoku.

And then he unloaded on the unsuspecting Human Resources and R&D coalition.

His heart was stolen to the tune of the _rat-a-tat-tat_ rhythm of the clip nailing Toka from Planning in the leg with pinpoint accuracy, laid bare for everyone to see like the errant blue splatters on the tarmac. Personnel were felled left and right before the corporate underdog, including Hashirama, who really had no right to enjoy the secondhand victory and resulting carnage, clinging like a limpet to said underdog’s arm for the rest of the miserable game.

Not swooning was impossible, not when Madara was gunning for corporate’s soft underbelly.

 

* * *

 

Nothing bonded souls more closely and more quickly than near-death experiences.

Paintball didn’t really qualify, even in the 21st century. All the groundwork had been laid before this, really, and dodging paint pellets (and therefore avoiding pain, which was, well, _life in a nutshell)_ was just another scene in their day-to-day lives.

“And the winning prize goes to the tag team of Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju!”

Up on stage, Hashirama made faces at his fuming brother like he hadn’t actually been dead weight as Madara dutifully accepted the prize, which turned out to be a mini-fridge, which was unbelievably stingy of a company of their size to do and illogical, because how were teams supposed to split up a single mini-fridge, barely fit for a college dorm?

In the end, Madara kept the fridge, for no particular reason other than that they’d flipped a coin for it.

They spent the rest of the picnic picking food off each others’ plates and feeding each other to the background of their brothers bickering and engaging in what was their version of a mid-twenties slap fight.

It was all terribly romantic. Hashirama had a nagging feeling that maybe they’d skipped a step somewhere along the way.

 

* * *

 

As it turned out, promotions didn’t come all at once after that like some watershed moment in the films.

That meant that his promise about improving the quality of the break room’s coffee had to wait. For at least another few years, if ever.

So Hashirama had to go and poke around the local roasters for the best blend of coffee he could find. It wasn’t much, not because of the lack of selection, but because he genuinely lacked the discerning sense and sensibility to pick one out, and all the recommendations tasted the same. And everyone in the business knew that price was no reliable indicator of value. Complaining really was Madara’s forte, not his.

The next time he walked into the break room, he did so with a bag of _so-and-so_ blend in hand, making Madara look up from his fiddling with the coffee machine.

Hashirama held out the bag like an offering to a god. Madara took it wordlessly and started processing it.

Unlike all the other occasions in the break room, conversation was rather sparse this time as they sipped at their mugs.

“How’s the mini-fridge?”

“Small.”

Hashirama nodded solemnly. A few more minutes and there’d be reprimands from HR for the both of them. But for the life of him and for all his bluster, he couldn’t find it in himself to break the silence, to work up the courage and ask—

“Thanks for the coffee,” he blurted, setting down his mug down a little too hard and turning to flee.

“Hold up.” A hand clamped down on his shoulder as he turned to return to life behind a desk. “You’re free after work.” It wasn’t a question, but he found himself nodding frantically anyway, the swooping feeling in his chest steadily growing too large to ignore. The multi-million dollar meeting with the higher-ups about securities acquisitions could wait anyway. “We can go out to get some real coffee. Nothing like this watery, tasteless shit you brought.”

“I’ve never been so insulted and excited to go out for coffee in my life,” Hashirama said with great relief, taking the hand from his shoulder in his own and threading their fingers together, all the while beaming guilelessly at Madara.

The small, secretive smile he received in return was the most novel thing he’d seen in his life. And here was the catch—it would never stop being just that.

**Author's Note:**

> this is a MESS, i’m a mess, please just take this off my hands. i was rereading good omens and the management training paintball scene and holy hell these office AUs compelled me to produce something really _ehhhyyeyyyhh_


End file.
